Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer science and, more specifically, to generating a consensus mesh from an input set of meshes.
Description of the Related Art
Meshing refers to techniques in computer graphics by which a three-dimensional (3D) surface may be covered by a “mesh” in much the same way upholstery covers a chair. While upholstery is made of fabric, a 3D mesh is created as a web of two-dimensional (2D) triangles. Triangles in a mesh may be filled with different colors, allowing a mesh to cover a 3D surface in a new color, much the same way a chair may be re-upholstered in a new fabric.
In many applications, a set of points, possibly with normals, needs to be covered with a triangle mesh that passes through the points. For example, an artist may wish to retile or repair a three-dimensional (3D) mesh while preserving important per-vertex attributes. As another example, the set of points may be a point cloud acquired using a 3D scanner, and the artist may desire maximum geometric fidelity in covering the point cloud with a mesh, but without artificial smoothing. In yet another example, the points may be sampled from a 3D surface and have important global properties, such a Poisson sampling, that should not be modified.
Various mesh generation techniques have been developed for covering sets of points with triangle meshes. However, these mesh generation techniques typically involve tuning parameters such as search radii or initial conditions such as seed triangles. As a result, a range of different meshes can be generated by varying the parameters and initial conditions. Depending on the parameters values chosen, such meshing techniques can leave unwanted flaws or holes in the mesh as an outcome of the meshing process.